Overview

EASE is a design experiement of an app targeting towards the LGBT+ community that allow users to search and make appointments for HIV and other tests across different organizations and test centers. It also aims to provide information regarding community health concerns such as availability of preventive Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP)  and emergency Post-exposure Prophylaxis (PEP).

Background

According to Hong Kong Department of Health statistics, HIV infection has affected the LGBT+ community disproportionally. While advances in medical science has made prevention methods available, the primary defence against the spread of infection is still regular testing. Based on (statistics here). Free rapid tests are widely available to the LGBT+ community but usage can still improve. Therefore an app that allows users to easily find available test appointments can be useful in facilitating smooth and frequent testing that will hopefully help lower the amount of new infections.

Problem

There are currently numerous organizations in Hong Kong that provides HIV testing, many of which service the LGBT+ community. However, partly due to the stigma attached to the disease, and perhaps also due to the amount of funding available, many organizations only advertise their services via social media. While this can be effective especially for the modern generation who receive much of their information via the internet and social media, the siloed and scattered nature of the information sources means that members of the community need to find testing spaces by going through various different organisations and looking up appointments. This can be especially stressful when a person is worried about their HIV status, or prefers the privacy of going through an online booking system rather than calling up each organization to find a suitable appointment.

Research

After interviewing people within the LGBT+ community, especially the MSM section of the community, data was gathered to understand what are some of the challenges and pain points of the current test-booking process.

Affinity diagram summarizing findings from interviews

Anonymity and ease of timeslot-finding are some of the major findings for this research. In general it is not difficult to find information on where to find a testing centre, but more in-depth information such as which tests beyond HIV are available, or what type of HIV tests are performed at each organisation takes a bit more digging to uncover for users. Time, test type, and location seem to be the three main concern on what members of the community value most when making test appointments.

Solution

The goal and concerns in looking for HIV test appointments turns out to be very similar to a rental booking system such as hotel or rental car booking, where users are trying to match location, date, and room/car type, therefore a hotel-searching paradigm was determined to be a good fit for this model, and focus the solution on allowing users to search for test appointments across different organizations based on date/time and location.

The value presented to the user is focused on the one-stop-shop nature of the workflow. The user is able to see all available appointments and compare the options that each represents. They are also able to filter by their specific needs such as test types and extra services that they wish to obtain. The ability to make these comparisons when choosing appointments will present a major time saving for users.

Flowchart for the proposed mobile app

Wireframe

Wireframe for EASE

Based on the hotel-booking model, the user is able to locate an available appointment based on their desired date, time and location. They are also able to filter by organisation, the types of tests that are available on the appointments, and the range of cost for the test (if it is not a free test). The app should be able to allow different confirmation workflows based on requirements of each organisation. Some organizations such as AIDS Concern Hong Kong requires that the tester must be within their target group, hence a pre-survey must be filled out first before an appointment is allowed to be made. The user is presented with clearly displayed information such as the date, time, address of the appointment upon successful booking.

Design

Visual Design Specifications for EASE

The visual design aims to use simple colors, with one bold theme color (moderately dark red) and an accent/highlight color based on the main theme color. Other elements such as background, text, content containers have neutral variants of grey to avoid overwhelming users and aid in content readability.

Prototype

Challenges

While the EASE mobile app aims to provide a way for users to make test appointments, there are several functionality that still need to be fleshed out, such as how will user be able to search and schedule recurring appointments. Furthermore, consolidate testing appointment information from various test centers into one easy-to-find location requires cooperation from various organizations

Another potential obstacle is that many organizations may have competing interests which can discourage them from being placed in a "compare and shop" situation. However, the ability for users to directly compare services will hopefully lead to healthy competition and in the long term lead to increase in service quality across the community. Finally, while it provides a central location for appointment search, how members of the community will find this app is still an issue that must be solved, just like how individual organizations must utilise various means such as SEO optimization and social media for community outreach, this app will also encounter the same issue.